The award, usually bestowed on several artists at once by the institution's oldest auxiliary group, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, consists of a modest cash prize and an SFMOMA exhibition. Despite the propellant potential of the exhibition, many awardees' careers have seemed inexplicably to stall right afterward. Toi Hoang, the single winner in 1994, offers an extreme example: For reasons both personal and professional, his next solo show did not take place for nearly 17 years.

But the long view provided by the current iteration - the 2010 SECA Awards exhibition, plus a look back titled "Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards" - shows how myopic my impression was.

"Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards" does not provide an exhaustive survey of the program. It draws mainly upon works by SECA winners that the museum has acquired by gift or purchase. The sporadic past SECA awards in film and video will be reprised in evening programs during February and March.

A tiny but inexcusable error tarnishes "Fifty Years": the failure of certain labels to mark that the artists they name are deceased. John Meyer (1943-2002) gets proper dates, but many visitors will leave believing that Terry Fox (1943-2008) and Jim Pomeroy (1945-92) live on. The comprehensive publication that documents "Fifty Years" corrects these omissions.

Thematic groupings rather than chronology structure the historical show, but the work on view spills over these conceptual fences, offering the excitement of making one's own connections. Compare the very different, yet philosophically sympathetic, uses of records and turntable by Paul DeMarinis (SECA 1996) and Mauricio Ancalmo (2010).

Few other contemporary artists cite literary sources for what they make, as Ancalmo does. In "Bay Area Now 6" at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, he presented "Dualing Pianos: (Agapç Agape in D Minor)" (2011). That piece, with a piano roll threading through it, took inspiration and part of its title from William Gaddis' last novel, "Agapç Agape," which uses the player piano as symbol of a baleful democratization of artistry and reception.

"A Lover's Discourse" takes its title whole from Roland Barthes' 1977 book that collects his splintered thoughts about the existential plight of being in love. Ancalmo has hung from the ceiling of a darkened room a film projector that runs a loop of found 16mm black-and-white footage. The projector works in tandem with a turntable and record below that woozily put forth a romantic song.

The projector endlessly twists and untwists on its long tether, whipping its images - of an unknown man and woman in a dance of flirtation - around the walls, one way, then the other.

"Neither knows the other yet," Barthes writes in a section headed "Encounter." "Hence each must tell the other 'This is what I am.' This is narrative bliss, the kind which both fulfills and delays knowledge, in a word restarts it. In the amorous encounter, I keep rebounding - I am light."

Probably no passage in the book corresponds better to the experience Ancalmo has contrived.

The other 2010 SECA artists' works function at a similar level of artifice by very different means. Colter Jacobsen's drawings from photographs and from memories of his drawings of photographs depend on manual skill to probe relations between representation and recall.

Kamau Amu Patton presents a multisensory ensemble of works, including vibration-sensitive sculptures, that rekindle in contemporary terms the early modernist dream of synesthesia.

Ruth Laskey produces linen canvases that she dyes and weaves herself, thread by thread: painting-like objects that take to the limit the early minimalist ambition to equate pattern and structure.

Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards; 2010 SECA Art Award: Works in many media. Through April 3. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., San Francisco. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org.

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